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Sunday, 29 May 2016

Sunday.

Our High Street here in Highdale is full of lovely old buildings. The one pictured above is nowhere near the oldest of them, but it does retain a lot of original features. In the glass of one of the first floor windows there is a date in part of the lead work. It is, I think 1657 - I don't quite trust my memory and will check this. The ground floor is, as you can see, now four separate shops. All the innards are surprisingly ungot at; i.e. quite fairly original. An old building is usually worth walking right round, if possible. Well, it's impossible with this one- as you can see (top picture- it is now part of a long terrace of buildings, so the ends of this one are invisible now.

However, it struck me that the rear of the building is still on view, partly because one of the four buildings is now a coffee shop, with seating in the rear garden. Also, from the street at the back of the building, which runs parallell (think I've got the 'l's right. The word 'parallellogram' always gave me problems at school -it's one of those words that look wrong however you spell them). Point is, that from a gate in the back street a photograph can be taken of the rear of the building. If you look in between the three 'pointy' roofs at the top, you can see two small doors that give on to the 'leads' between the dormers. Don't know what the doors were for, but no doubt they had a purpose. From the back of the building it looks as if the building dates from the sixteenth century. Our town has lots of little lanes behind both sides of the High Street, so it's often possible to view the rear of most buildings, and I can think of quite a few that have had new facades put in, but usually the rear view is rather more original. Must start looking closer.

2 comments:

In my later years I need a dictionary by my computer as words I have been using for decades now sometimes look wrong. Unfortunately it is quite heavy - I drop it frequently and put it back together with difficulty.